Over the last quarter-century, the vast majority (81.7 percent) of increases to wealth have gone to the wealthiest 5 percent, while those in the middle saw declines in their wealth.
Republican delusions, deceptions, and denialism
With a 2012 election looming, GOP candidates and leaders are insisting that we ought to blame a Democratic president who’s in his first term for decades of Republican policies. Mitt Romney, Rick Perry, and Republican leadership are asking us to overlook the calamitous and pretty much continual failures of governance by the GOP in their bid to retake the White House:
Leave aside for the moment that Ronald Reagan tripled the national debt and increased the debt ceiling 17 times. Forget also George W. Bush nearly doubled the debt or that the Bush tax cuts were the biggest driver of debt over the past decade, and if made permanent, would be continue to be so over the next. Pay no attention to the federal tax burden now at its lowest level in 60 years or income inequality at its highest level in 80 years after a decade of plummeting rates for America’s supposed job creators who don’t create jobs. Ignore for now that Republican majorities voted seven times to raise the debt ceiling under President Bush and the current GOP leadership team voted a combined 19 times to bump the debt limit $4 trillion during his tenure. Look away from the two unfunded wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the budget-busting Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 and the Medicare prescription drug program because, after all, John Boehner, Eric Cantor and Mitch McConnell voted for all of it.
And John Boehner, Eric Cantor, and Mitch McConnell couldn’t possibly be wrong. They are, after all, Republicans.
As the recent campaigning by GOP candidates demonstrates, the party remains absolutely committed to the belief that cutting taxes (especially for the wealthiest) creates jobs and leads to economic growth. Just as Republicans refuse to accept scientific evidence for global warming, they are refusing to accept scientific evidence for the failure of their economic policies:
Rising income inequality, like climate change, is an ideologically inconvenient issue for conservatives. They would prefer not to discuss it altogether. If forced to discuss it, they will generally either deny its existence or simply carry on as if it doesn’t exist.
The underlying facts […] are stark. Over the last few decades, income growth for most Americans has slowed to a crawl, while income for the very rich has exploded. That’s a reversal of the three decades following World War II, when all income groups got richer, with the poor and middle class rising at a faster rate than the rich. Crucially, the Congressional Budget Office’s new analysis shows that changes in government policy over this period have made inequality worse
[…]
The Republican plan is to slash taxes for the rich and programs for the poor, thereby massively increasing inequality.
That is a hard position to defend in the context of exploding inequality, and conservatives would rather not defend it. Instead the right’s response has been to persistently deny or ignore the facts. Rick Perry, pressed by a reporter to explain why he was proposing a tax plan that would widen income inequality further, replied, “I don’t care about that.” The Wall Street Journal editorial page today dismissed the Tax Policy Center, whose calculations persistently show the ways in which various Republican tax proposals would widen inequality, as “liberal.” It didn’t even pretend to dispute the substance of the calculations. Eric Cantor gave a speech about income inequality centering on stories about how his grandmother worked hard and pulled herself up by the bootstraps in the old days. It was a nice speech if you like stories about plucky grandmothers. It failed to grasp the central dilemma, which is that it was a lot easier for poor people to move up sixty years ago, when tax rates on the rich happened to be far higher, than it is today.
I honestly can’t fathom just how deluded these fools are.
Lies, damned lies, and GOP economic policy
I highly recommend this piece. It pulls together a lot of recent data and analysis on the economy, tax policy, and income inequality in the U.S. It seems like it’d be useful to have on hand for discussions about both the Occupy movement and the upcoming presidential campaign:
[E]ven with the wildly popular surcharge [proposed by President Obama on annual incomes over a million dollars] beginning in 2013, the tax bite for America’s millionaires would look little different than during the Clinton era (35 percent income tax rate now versus 39.6%; capital gains rate of 15% now versus 20 percent then) when they and almost everyone else enjoyed a booming economy. More importantly, with income inequality at its highest level in 80 years while the federal tax burden is at its lowest in 60, the top 1% has already triumphed in the class war Republicans continue to fight on their behalf.
Economic data from the past few decades overwhelmingly shows that GOP trickle-down type economic policies are actually quite harmful to the economy:
[H]istorically lower tax rates for the richest Americans did not produce either more job creation or faster economic growth. (In fact, the Bush years produced what David Leonhardt of the New York Times rightly labeled as “The decade with the slowest average annual growth since World War II.”) But what the conservative cornucopia for the gilded-class does reliably produce is unprecedented income inequality.
[…]
Analyses by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities showed that the Bush tax cuts accounted for half of the deficits during his tenure, and if made permanent, over the next decade would cost the U.S. Treasury more than Iraq, Afghanistan, the recession, TARP and the stimulus - combined.
[…]
[T]he Washington Post summed up data from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) to explain the origins of the $14.3 trillion U.S. debt. As the numbers show, history did not, as Republicans pretend, start on January 20, 2009:
The biggest culprit, by far, has been an erosion of tax revenue triggered largely by two recessions and multiple rounds of tax cuts. Together, the economy and the tax bills enacted under former president George W. Bush, and to a lesser extent by President Obama, wiped out $6.3 trillion in anticipated revenue. That’s nearly half of the $12.7 trillion swing from projected surpluses to real debt.
Even though I’ve read quite a bit about income inequality in the U.S., this graph is still startling.
You see that flat red line aaallll the way down there at the bottom of the graph? That’s us, that’s the America that the 99% have been living in for the past 30 years.
Income inequality is more severe in the U.S. than it is in nearly all of West Africa, North Africa, Europe, and Asia. We’re on par with some of the world’s most troubled countries, and not far from the perpetual conflict zones of Latin American and Sub-Saharan Africa. Our income gap is also getting worse, having widened both in absolute and relative terms since the 1980s.
"It’s bad enough that the vast majority of Americans are mired in income stagnation, or even falling backward. But perhaps even more troubling is how the concentration of wealth in the executive class has been mirrored by a concentration of political power employed to serve the interests of that class. Keeping taxes low on the wealthy has become a higher priority than funding the kinds of social welfare safety net programs that would at least partially compensate working-class Americans for their failure to keep pace with the gains enjoyed by the richest Americans. Supreme Court decisions now routinely favor business-class priorities. Eager to keep the corporate campaign finance contributions flowing, both Democrats and Republicans strive to keep regulation as light as possible on corporate America."
— The triumph of business-class America | Andrew Leonard, Salon (via pantslessprogressive)
(via pantslessprogressive)
